Fire ecology database for documenting plant responses to fire events in Australia.

Abstract

An understanding of fire-response traits is essential for predicting how fire regimes structure plant communities and for informing fire management strategies for biodiversity conservation. Quantification of these traits is complex, encompassing several levels of data abstraction scaling up from field observations of individuals, to general categories of species responses. We developed the Fire Ecology Database to accommodate this complexity. Its conceptual framework is underpinned by a flexible data pipeline enabling links between fire-related trait data and event information at individual, population, and community levels. Key features include: (a) concise and documented trait and method vocabularies; (b) documented uncertainty in observations and aggregation; and (c) documented origin of data including field observations, laboratory experiments, and expert elicitation. We demonstrated application of our framework using data from new field surveys and existing data sets in New South Wales, Australia. The database includes 14 traits for 6,287 plant species derived from 8,936 field work records from 2007 to 2018, 7,054 field records from surveys after 2019, and 48,306 records from 301 existing sources.

Plant phenotyping relevance

火災応答形質を体系的に収集・標準化するデータベースとデータパイプライン自体が中心的な方法論的貢献であり、植物形質データの不確実性・測定法・由来も記録しているため、フェノタイピング用データ基盤として含める。

Code and data availability

The paper's core outputs (Fire Ecology Database v1.1 SQL dump, R data frames, CSV/XLSX exports on FigShare/OSF, and the Python import scripts/Jupyter notebooks) are stated to be publicly available, but no concrete repository URL or identifier for them appears in the supplied blocks, and none matches an allowed URL, so